September 7, 2011

The Journal of Art Crime, Spring 2011: David Gill's Context Matters looks at "The Unresolved Case of the Minneapolis Krater"

In the Spring 2011 issue of The Journal of Art Crime, David Gill writes about "The Unresolved Case of the Minneapolis Krater" in his regular column Context Matters.

Gill, head of the Division of Humanities and Professor of Archaeological Heritage at University Campus Suffolk, at Ipswich, Suffolk, England (from October 2011) and author of Sifting the soil of Greece: the early years of the British School at Athens (1886-1919), answers the question of why the dispute over the krater needs to be resolved. The Athenian pot, decorated with a Dionysiac scene, was acquired in 1983 from the London-based dealer Robin Symes by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Although the collecting history for the krater claims that it had been private owned by collectors in Switzerland and Great Britain for 15 years prior to the purchase, the pot has been identified from the photographic archive seized in a warehouse facility held by Robert Hecht and Giacomo Medici, convicted in 2004 for dealing in stolen ancient artifacts.

To read more about this five-year-old dispute, you may obtain a copy of this issue by subscription through the ARCA website or through Amazon.com.